30YearsWar #66: A Tale of Two Crowns [1639-40]

When Diplomacy Fails Podcast

Zack Twamley

Phd, International Relations, Korean War, European History, 17th Century, 18th Century, Politics, 20th Century, Thirty Years' War, History, 19th Century, War, First World War

4.8 • 773 Ratings

🗓️ 12 October 2022

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

King Philip IV of Spain and King Charles of Britain had a surprising amount in common by the late 1630s. Both were presiding over a deteriorating situation domestically and abroad, and during the Battle of the Downs in October 1639, both came off worse than before.

For Charles, the problem was one of authority, which had suffered terribly following years of wrong headed religious and political policies. With Scotland in revolt, and only pacified with painful concessions by spring 1639, Charles needed a win, and nothing said defeat like the prospect of watching a Spanish-Dutch naval battle off the coast of Dover. Having presented himself as the Sovereign of the Seas, this was a sharp strike against Charles' honour, and things were soon to get worse.

Many miles away in Madrid, King Philip IV's greatest problem was the intractable Dutch, followed by the equally intractable Catalans. Even after Count Olivares had asked them really nicely, the Catalans had not agreed to aid and supply the defending Spanish garrisons, and matters came to a head thanks in no small measure to Olivares' heavy-handed responses. Olivares may have been trying to make a point about the King's authority - a move Charles would surely have sympathised with - but his approach caused the very disaster he had longed to avoid.

By autumn 1640, both Spain and Britain were wracked by conflict and division, as the Thirty Years' War's actor looked on, and asked whether it was really fair on historians to open yet more fronts to this multi-layered conflict. Fair or not, here we delve into these issues, so I hope you'll join me!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for your support on Patreon, Anthony Klon.
0:04.3	Anthony was present during the Battle of the Downs in 1639 and cited the huge Spanish fleet 80 ships strong that were entering the channel and signalled Admiral Martin Trump to let him know the news.
0:19.4	Good eye, Anthony. This of course is all lie, but if you
0:21.9	would like me to lie about you, you know where to go. patreon.com for it slash when diplomacy
0:26.4	fails or click on the link in the description below.
0:45.1	Hello and welcome history friends, patrons all to episode 66 of the 30 Years' War.
0:52.2	Last time we saw how difficult the effort of coordinating and simply winning the war was for the Hussbergs by the late 1630s. You also may have noticed that I put in the
0:57.7	years in brackets for those episodes. I'm going to try and do that for all the episodes so that we're
1:03.0	a bit clearer about when each of these episodes are based. Hopefully it'll make the bigger picture a bit more
1:10.5	clear and hopefully it'll also make
1:13.1	would-be listeners more willing to jump into this fascinating era that I'm sure we're all really
1:18.5	enjoying. So Johann Banner and his rag-tag army of Swedes in northern Germany managed to outmaneuver
1:26.2	Matthias Gallus's army, and the removal of
1:28.3	Gallus' army from the Rhine had granted Bernard of Saxe Weimar a unique opportunity to make
1:34.3	some headway against Alsace. This just shows how interconnected everything was by this point,
1:39.6	that in order to fight the Swedes, the Habsbergs had to leave the Rhine basically undefended, and Bernard
1:45.4	didn't waste any time. In December 1638, he captured Bryce Sack, and now the French and
1:52.9	Swedes appeared to be getting somewhere, but this was by no means the major story.
1:59.0	The Spanish, as we saw, were beginning to buckle under the pressure of the war as
2:03.6	well. They'd been fighting intermittently in Europe since 1618, and, lest we forget, they'd also
2:09.6	been fighting the Dutch with a few breaks since the 1560s. Their resources were strained to breaking
2:16.4	point. Thanks to problems within Portugal and also Catalonia,
	...

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